Pet Sematary

by Stephen King

[celinenyx]

Stephen King has called Pet Sematary his scariest book - and while I get where he is coming from, I also found it his dullest.

Louis Creed moves with his family to a nice house in Ludlow, Maine. There is little remarkable about it, except for the grassy path leading into the forest. At the end of the path a cemetery lies where children have been burying their beloved pets for generations. Yet the path does not stop at the Pet Sematary - a darker road leads further, into places only fit for nightmares.

Pet Sematary circles around a single clear conflict: how far will people go in order to spare their loved ones grief? How does one deal with death? This recurring theme follows all characters throughout the book. Rachel has lost a sister when she was only a child. Louis works in the medical profession, and faces deaths of the most gruesome kinds. Their neighbour, Judd, has a wife who probably will not outlive him. Death permeates this novel, and perhaps that is what created such a hesitance and even aversion to reading this book.

King always writes in an easy, accessible style that is born from years of practice. Usually one can breeze through his books, because his prose draws you forward. This magic did not work for me this time, making me slog through the majority of this novel. Related to this issue might be the fact that King writes a men's world. Even though he occasionally incorporates female characters, they are generally flat, passive, and more often than not become victim of one evil or another. I felt this very keenly in Pet Sematary, where Rachel is only given page time when her thoughts refer to Louis or her children. She has no personality or agency of her own. This was such a shame, because I found her backstory to be more interesting than anything Louis brought to the table - after a few hundred pages, I was fed up with his standoffish ways and tough-guy talk with neighbour Judd.

Like in many of his novels, the characters of Pet Sematary face a nameless evil, something that can be bested - if one is willing to sacrifice something - for a short period of time. The idea of cyclical evil, of some force returning again and again, lying dormant for some years before rearing its ugly head, is something that is familiar from most of King's bestselling novels, including The Shining and It. Though darkness looms, I did not feel the terror I expected to when reading Pet Sematary. The evil always felt too distant, and the characters were too bland to instill any sort of compassion within me.

Pet Sematary boils down to a will he/won't he, and I truly did not need to read over six hundred pages to find out whether he would.